Transcript: DHS Fellow Codes for Truck Safety and Security

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Kristen Lancaster

Critical national security issues reside not only at our nation’s airports and seaports. They also reside in the cargo holds of the tractor trailers that travel our nation’s interstate highways.

Trucks loaded with radioactive materials travel interstate highways every day, and, although strict guidelines regulate what they carry, they still pose a safety hazard and could threaten the nation’s security.

The goal for truck weigh stations of the future is to have specialized monitors installed that can check for radioactive materials in a safe and efficient way.

Kristen Lancaster writes computer code for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Southeastern Transportation Corridor Pilot project, which focuses on designing and installing these specialized monitors at interstate highway weigh stations. The research takes place at Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

“The Southeastern Transportation Corridor Pilot project is a project that Oak Ridge National Lab is working on to implement radiation detection at truck weigh stations. It’s a place where nearly all trucks will go at some point during their journeys, and we hope to use that as a way to corral them and catch them if they’re transporting illegal, radioactive substances.”

The challenge of the project is to design a system that will be able to detect so-called “good” or normal radiation from the bad radiation. Lancaster explains:

“One of the problems that comes in in detecting radiation in trucks is that some regular commodities have radioactive signatures that could be mistaken for being more than that, for instance kitty liter or bananas or toilets. Those are things that all have radioactive signatures that could pose a problem in detecting when the radiation coming from a truck is a bad kind or not a bad kind.”

To overcome this obstacle, the team is collecting and analyzing data and writing computer code so that radiation detectors mounted on the weigh-in motion scale can find what they call “anomalies.” These anomalies in the data might signify a potential problem requiring a truck to stop at the station for further investigation of its cargo.

Lancaster’s participation in the project is supported by her fellowship with the DHS Scholarship and Fellowship Program. Fellows are required to intern at a DHS-affiliated facility in order to gain practical research experience.

“The DHS Scholarship and Fellowship have allowed me to focus on my studies. I don’t have to work, because I get paid to go to school, and that’s been really nice. As well as when during these summer internships where I go to these different national labs I see the technologies that are coming, I see, I get an opportunity to experience research first-hand and to decide if that’s an avenue I want to follow in my career.”

When Lancaster’s internship comes to an end, she will head back to Ohio to complete her master’s degree in cyber operations at the Air Force Institute of Technology, taking with her the research experience she has gained as a DHS Fellow.